Friends of the Kenai River watershed,

Homer Electric's planned Grant Lake Hydroelectric Project has advanced through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's draft EIS process.  Last evening, we sat down with FERC officials where they presented their draft environmental impact study.

At this forum, FERC officials took comments and any suggestions for updates to their final EIS.

The most alarming omissions to the current draft EIS is the lack of responsibility for documenting anadromous salmon and salmonoid  (trout/dolly varden) species prior to and throughout the duration of the life of the licensed project.

Essentially, there will be no benchmarks, nor any targets for maintaining a healthy population of salmon and salmoniods.

Right now, Grant Creek supports spawning populations of King Salmon, Coho Salmon and Sockeye Salmon that run up from the Kenai River.

Further, it has been demonstrated time and time again that there is no need for the proposed generation of such a small amount of power.  There are already spinable reserves on the railbelt (Bradley Lake most notably) and there are stranded power and transmission problems that, if addressed, would fix a lot of issues on the railbelt.

Homer Electric's board has stated that they would not move forward "if the project harms fish." However, with no way of documenting fish prior to, and during the life of the licensed project, they will have no way to know if the project is harming fish and there will be no repercussions if fish populations suffer losses - they will have no responsibility to protect fish on Grant Creek.

Hydroelectric projects that divert water, change natural flows, cut off traditional spawning reaches and change temperatures almost universally harm anadromous salmon populations (see Cooper Creek that is now devoid of spawning and rearing salmon).

Aside from the impacts to fish and the lack of necessity for this small amount of power generation, the historic Iditarod Trail sits adjacent to the proposed project site.  There have been talks to re-route the historic trail and/or cross over it 2 times by way of an access road to the project site.

Lastly, the officials from FERC were presented with facts about the railbelt and its inefficiencies last night.  They were not aware that we have transmission line issues, stranded power and inefficiencies across the entire grid.  FERC's approval of this project and moving forward with it undermines the real issues on the railbelt, not to mention highlights how unnecessary this project is.

Comments to FERC are due by December 10th and we will be posting links where the public can make comments.  We will also be reaching out to the board of Homer Electric to share your input and hold a Q & A session with the public.

Thank you again for your continued support of our watersheds of the peninsula, specifically the Kenai River!

-Peninsula Rivers Conservancy Board